Vaganova Method

The back is treated as the origin of movement rather than a column to hold still, so the torso inclines, twists and yields into arabesque and into the preparation for a jump. Épaulement is strong and constant, arms move through defined positions with the elbow supported and the wrist unbroken, and the head follows a prescribed relationship to the working arm in each pose. Turnout is worked from the hip with the pelvis kept square, aplomb on the vertical axis is drilled before anything is added, and jumps are coordinated so that the arms and upper body carry the dancer up rather than being carried along.

Pas de deux is taught as a separate examined subject with its own syllabus, beginning in the middle years of training and progressing through supported turns, lifts and overhead work. Nikolai Serebrennikov's course at the Leningrad school became the standard text for it. The approach favours large lifts and sustained supported balances, and expects the woman to hold her own placement rather than be corrected by the man.

Vaganova training has no examination board in the Western sense; assessment happens as annual state examinations inside the academy, with elimination at each year. Its graduates dominate the classical prizes at Varna, Moscow and the Prix de Lausanne, and the standard nineteenth-century competition variations are drilled in the school repertoire classes. The Vaganova Prize and the academy's own graduation performances function as the internal equivalent of a competition circuit.

Moscow and St Petersburg are not the same: the Bolshoi academy works from a related syllabus with its own bravura emphasis, and Russians distinguish the two readily. Cuban training under Fernando and Alicia Alonso took the Vaganova frame and combined it with Italian and French elements into a recognisably separate school, and Chinese, Korean and Eastern European academies each adapted it. Much Western teaching labelled Vaganova is a partial borrowing of arm positions, arabesque numbering and terminology rather than the eight-year state syllabus.

It is not simply the Imperial Russian tradition handed down unchanged; it is a twentieth-century synthesis that deliberately corrected what Vaganova considered failures in the teaching she received. The very high extensions and hyperextended lines now read as Russian are a later drift, not something her book asks for, and her own writing is insistent about restraint and correct placement. Her book is a manual for teachers explaining principles, not a fixed set of exercises to be copied.